Tag: bb passport

The Blackberry name was not a very popular name in South Africa amongst the blind and visually impaired users.

It was slow, crashed more than what was acceptable and generally provided a horrible UI that was slower than many things I can think of but, that I won’t mention here for the fear of not having enough server space to store the content thereof.

however, the Blackberry Passport was a refreshing change and Blackberry provided me with a test unit. Thank you.

The device feels very solid in the hand; a very sure 196 g, and comes with a physical qwerty keyboard.

Looking at the specs, one cannot really complain but, as a totally blind user, you would not really like the device.

The screen reader is still very unfinished and I wouldn’t use this phone as my primary phone.

However, the magnification features built-in are definitely of a decent standard thus, if you have some vision left and you can afford this beasty, I’d highly recommend it.

The standard geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, HDR, and panorama features are found to make up the rest of the camera offering.

Oh, I almost forgot about the video recording. 1080p@60fps, is the best the BB can do.

The front camera is a 2 MP, 720p camera and suffices for video calling and other functions.

I’m not going into all of the specs but, I must say that the Non-removable Li-Ion 3450 mAh battery really comes in handy. The standby time is really good and even if you are a somewhat heavy user, it won’t let you down.

Perfect for the business user and for those who love their qwerty keyboards; really hard to find fault with this phone apart from the lack of action in the screen reader department.

However, as you may have heard, Blackberry is soon coming out with an Android based device with a full physical qwerty keyboard. Looking forward to that one? Just wondering because, I am!

Thanks again to Blackberry South Africa for having made this device available to me.

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